It’s summer. Everyone knows that planting season is spring. So, what do you do when you discover you misplaced packets of seeds – zinnias, tithonia and nasturtiums in my case, but it could be peas, beans, carrots, lettuce or zucchini?

Plant them! If you still have plenty of space, just direct-seed them in the garden. My misplaced seed packets – purchased from Pinetree Garden Seeds in New Gloucester – were packed for 2023 and 2022, so they should be viable. If garden space is tight, you could do a viability test – putting seeds between damp paper towels to see if they sprout within seven days – but that would make you even later with your planting.

With some of the zinnias, described as “cut and come again,” my later-than-usual planting will mean that I’ve missed about a month of cut flowers that my wife Nancy and I could have, would have, enjoyed. But getting blossoms in August instead of July is not a terrible loss.

Although in my case planting seeds this late in the season is a mistake, it also is good gardening practice – one that we do every year: succession planting.

We enjoy having shelling peas throughout the summer. We plant our main crop of peas in mid-April so we will have them for the traditional Fourth of July meal of salmon and peas, but we also plant some around Memorial Day, which gives us another crop of peas to eat during August. I have tried without success planting peas in late June with hopes of having a fall crop, too, but it hasn’t worked. I think the pea seeds like sprouting in cool, damp weather, which isn’t usual for Maine in July and August.

Nancy gave me instructions this year that she wants more baby carrots throughout the summer. And she means real baby carrots, pulled out of the ground small from early July to after the first frost in the fall. These young carrots are sweet and tender, a far cry from the plastic-wrapped supermarket baby carrots, which are actually mature carrots that have been chopped into pieces and then whittled down to look like baby carrots.

She also wants more young beets and beet greens.

I planted some carrots and beet greens in our cold frame – mini-greenhouse – in early April and have been planting a new crop every two weeks, some in the cold frame and some straight in the garden. I will keep planting them until August, with hopes of supplying us with baby carrots until the ground freezes.

Another crop I will replant in a couple of weeks is lettuce. Although the type we plant is also cut-and-come-again, the plantings get tired in the heat of July and do like the sometimes cooler and definitely shorter days of late August.

You can plant broccoli now, too. Since moving here almost 50 years ago, the earliest frost we’ve ever had on our property was on Sept. 20. That must have been in the late ’70s or maybe early ’80s. Since direct-seeded broccoli takes about 85 days to reach maturity, so now is a good time to plant it for a fall harvest.

If you want to gamble – we’ve had years recently in which we haven’t had a frost until late October – you could plant even later and see what happens. Even if you fail, all you’ve lost is the price of a packet of seeds.

Tom Atwell is a freelance writer gardening in Cape Elizabeth. He can be contacted at: tomatwell@me.com

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